The VW Passat is a road car which, in a rare twist these days, has no ambitions whatsoever to be an off-road car. Flying in the face of the contemporary fondness for vehicles that look like they could be driven across fields and through bogs - even if they couldn't and won't be - VW presents the Passat as a saloon for smooth stretches of tarmac.
"You'll want to keep it that way," goes the slogan on the advertisements for the car, in which Passat owners are witnessed preferring to lock the car and walk through safari parks or set out on foot across the highlands, rather than risk the possibility of damage to their vehicle by animals or loose chippings.
Even in its new form, the Passat comes with no big lumps of plastic to protect the paintwork from bullrushes and no additional heated towel-rails bolted to the front to see off bullying kangaroos and incautious schoolchildren. You can buy a four-wheel-drive version, but VW isn't making much of a fuss about that. This is one for the road, and only the road.
It still has the big sweeping roof and loopy wheel arches of the VW Beetle, which were borrowed as part of VW's plan to make a car which looked slightly happier than normal to be a saloon - this being a sector more usually associated with dignity and dullness.
Still, the new Passat attempts to raise a quiet smile. The front end has been radically altered - a creased bonnet sloping down to a chunky new grille and a VW badge the size of a football. The dashboard lights up in a shade of lilac unseen since the decline of the kaftan. Yet, despite these "fun" touches, the car still feels rather imposingly serious and adult. You can imagine very little take-up for it among, say, rich students - or anyone, really, under the age of about 45. In a golf club car park, it might look a slightly racy choice. Elsewhere, it's going to look safe as houses.
Things have changed in the redesign, mostly for the better. For instance, according to VW, the new Passat is "10% more torsionally rigid". It's something that happens to all of us as we grow older, though that doesn't automatically mean that we become, like the Passat, "a stiffer, safer, quieter vehicle which is more refined on the road".
The new model is taller than the outgoing one: a full three millimetres taller. I defy anyone without a doctorate in aerodynamics and their own personal wind tunnel to appreciate the consequences of this - though I guess it does allow exceptionally tall drivers up to a week's additional growth of hair before they come to feel uncomfortable in the vehicle.
The car is, however, 28mm longer, and this is an apprecia ble difference, as anyone trying to back the new model into a confined parking space will rapidly realise. In only a week of testing in densely populated urban conditions, I hit the following stationary vehicles with the rear end of my Passat: a Volvo estate, a fairly old-looking Peugeot 205 and one of those nice, sporty BMW Z3s. Apologies to all concerned. But at the same time, there was no damage done - or certainly not to the Passat, which is the important thing. Robust, then, as well as long, stiff, safe and quiet.
I drove a diesel version, which was almost certainly a big mistake. The image of diesel engines has undergone something of a makeover. At Rover and elsewhere, important work is under way on the construction of a diesel engine that doesn't sound like a Post Office van and drive like a handcart. BMW has fitted its 330 saloon with a diesel engine quiet enough and quick enough to satisfy Jenson Button, who was caught doing 147mph in it. If car manufacturing was fashion, people would be trying to say that diesel was the new petrol. Even Jeremy Clarkson has recently written approvingly of a diesel engine, which is something like the Archbishop of Canterbury converting to Catholicism.
In the Passat TDi, alas, the revolution has yet to take place. Ticking over, the engine still rattles like a crate of empty milk bottles. True, it will pin your neck to the headrest with one hearty push of the accelerator in second gear, but the noise will have you imagining you're in a fighter plane. The petrol engines are, I presume, more in keeping with the car's finish.
And the Passat is - nobody could deny - well finished. Among a number of entertaining tweaks, the cup holders, between the driver's seat and the passenger's seat, are larger than they used to be - in response, one assumes, to retailers' ever more generous assessments of what constitutes a regular coffee. If this trend continues, cars will soon have to come with a tank for beverages, much as they now come with tanks for oil and petrol.
Best of all, though, is that you can now make the air conditioning function inside the glove compartment. Never again will you need to worry whether your tinned sweets and tissues are the same temperature as you are. The road is long; these are important considerations.
